Spending Time With Friends: Priceless

Friends Are Not Easy to Find

We all have people we call friends. But think about it. Just how many REALLY good friends do you have? Friends for life? Do you have friends you can tell your deepest darkest things to? Friends whom you can count on for absolutely anything; I mean ANYTHING? I bet not that many. You probably have a large circle of acquaintances, maybe even close acquaintances. But would they drop everything and drive half way across the country to be there when you need them? Will they still be there 50 years from now? Can you and your friends go weeks or months with no contact and then pick up a conversation as if it had happened just yesterday? When my husband died suddenly in 1996 my friends dropped what they were doing in their lives and drove here to be with me. There was a hurricane that week, but they came. I knew they would.

What I Gained From My College Years

I went to Marietta College, a small private Midwestern college in the ’60s. My mother told me when I went away that I would be making friends that would be different from my high school friends due to the fact that I would be actually living with these new people. She was correct. I came away from college with four other people whom I call family. We would write the occasional letter (remember I’m a child of the ’60s) and make an occasional phone call and it was wonderful to hear from them. It didn’t hit me how close we really were until one of my friends died in her early forties. We went to the funeral in Bloomington, IN and vowed not to let time go by before we got together again. Since then we have met at least once a year in some city that is centrally located. This year it was Pittsburgh. I just got home from our annual weekend. The group has expanded to include spouses. We’ve been to Nashville, to Cleveland to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to Hershey Park, to Hagerstown, MD which was not exciting, but we were together, so we didn’t care. We’ve been to weddings of the kids. We all have grandkids now and gray hair and aches and pains but we are aging together.

I love my friends in the same way I love my two brothers. They are both forever!